PhoneticsWhen I was working at the Royal Bank of Scotland, part of the training ritual was to learn this phonetic alphabet so that we'd have a standard, professional way of reading letters back to customers, instead of 'P for Peter, H for Harry, O for Orange' etc. I used to know it backwards, but it seems my brain has since decided it was important to replace portions of that information to make way for the lyrics to Lily Allen's The Fear (here it is sung by The Siberian Chipmunks). Or like whatever. Anyway, in an attempt to relearn what I have learned I've put together this playlist.

Film At about 3:15 this afternoon, I finally pulled the coat that had been sitting in my lap for two hours over my head as the room swelled with jingly-jangly music and I sat in my own personal darkness trying to gather my thought processes back into a state which would allow me to stand up, put on said coat, pick up my back pack and make my way out of the cinema. The credits were rolling on Charlie Kaufman’s new(ish) film Synecdoche, New York and I simply didn’t know what to do with myself. I was elated, pleased, excited and knew two things. That I couldn’t wait to see it again and again and also that I was looking forward to reading the inevitable film theory spin-offs.

Reviewers have been desperate to label the film a ‘masterpiece’ but none of writing I’ve seen has noted the film’s debt to the great auteurs, giants like Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Resnais, Fellini and Tati, directors who treated their audience with intelligence and respect with work in which ideas took precedence over explaining the plot and offered a visual contract that asked us to use our own imagination and personal experience to explain the order of events and character motivations. Like Kaufman, they’ve also been accused of self-indulgence which isn’t necessarily incorrect; but everyone with a personal vision is self-indulgent and more often than not the really interesting, surprising work comes when that vision hasn’t been compromised.

Many of the films of those directors have moments in which the viewer finds their understanding being stretched, which probably require a pause to check some director’s notes. Synecdoche is replete with such incidents, though like those films too, the ideas and themes coalesce afterwards as they did for me on the train home. That if we’re not all careful we can all find ourselves in a state of recursion trying to recreate the times when we truly comfortable rather than creating something new, a constant state of discontentedness that leads us to miss the moments when we actually should be contented. I'm growing my hair longer again because I remember being happier when I had longer hair. That sort of thing. Or we become afraid of taking risks in case that contentedness is wrecked, leading to a kind of emotional paralysis.

Nothing appears at Google Scholar yet. There’s the fittingly titled, “Debating Inclusion in Synecdoche, New York: A Response to Gresham and MacMillan” which is about “the comparative development of socialization skills in children with disabilities placed in inclusive or non-inclusive educational programs” but these things take time, critical mass must build, the film is too new. In interviews, Kaufman has said that he only wants to create films which lead to at least one conversation afterwards and he must have succeeded; for years to come I suspect, people will be debating the meaning of the work, from its structure to themes to meaning and not just in film classes, but psychonalysis courses. And mathematics labs too.

A couple of years ago I was filtering through my CD collection working out what I would end up selling at Vinyl Exchange. I realised that other than film soundtracks and compilations, all I seemed to have was the work of female vocalists and particularly, obscure female vocalists. The list reads like a ‘who’s who’ of ‘who the hell’ . . . odd thing is how many actually have official web sites.

The only the conclusion I can come to as to why I’ve less Travis and more Tori Amos is reality. Other than this new wave of bands, your Semisonics and Stereophonics, male writers tend to write about the fantasy of a situation whereas your average angry grrrl will offer the reality.

It’s the on-going contrast between the shutdown emotions of the male and the open feelings of the female. Looking at the male members of my music collection I begin to see a trend. Bob Dylan, REM, Hootie and the Blowfish and The Devlins tend to write about their feelings, certainly more than the Bryan (I was twelve in 1969) Adams’ of this worlds.

Plus there is definitely a lot more expression in the voice of the average Lisa Loeb. In a female vocal track, there is more likely to be that heartbreaking note which scares the bejesus out of you.

Film One of the best elements of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca was the serpent-like performance of supporting actor George Sanders as an old friend of the old Mrs De Winter and he was back again for Hitch’s other film of 1940, Foreign Correspondent, this time as an altogether more charming British newspaperman who helps the lead character, Joel McCrea the foreign correspondent, to his story about the assassination of a foreign diplomat at the edge of the second world war. Their banter is definitely one of the highlights, and it’s a shame that Hitch wasn’t interested in franchises since a whole series could have spun off about these two men travelling the world chasing down exclusives as war crashes about around them with Laraine Day constantly on their tale ready to pull them back from the edge.

In his book on film genre, Film/Genre, theorist Rick Altman talks about how films, in an effort to appeal to as wide a market as possible can no longer be pigeon-holed in the old Hollywood tradition -- western, gangster, screwball, woman's film and in an attempt to appeal to as wide an audience as possible blend them together. Hitch was ahead of the game here as well, since Foreign Correspondent was already doing much the same thing forty years early. Within its two hours, Hitch manages to drop in elements of newspaper films, spy dramas, romantic comedy, war films, noir, travelogue, political thriller and even a disaster movie and so cunningly that it doesn’t draw attention to itself in the same way as, for example, From Dusk Till Dawn which very specifically wanted its audience to know it was incoherently slipping into a different genre mid-stream (and arguably becoming a better film in the process).

He even managed to attract the very enemy he was working against. Joseph Goebbels was, well not a fan exactly but enamoured enough to call it a masterpiece of the form, “a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries.” What Goebbels might have been picking up on is that Hitch is careful not to portray the enemy within the film in completely black and white terms -- in at least one case we're clearly supposed to have a sympathetic reaction because the man is defending his country just as McCrea and Sanders are defending theres. They commit despicable crimes yet we find ourselves readily identifying ourselves with them and Hitch is demonstrating that there's nothing scarier than an enemy hiding in plain sight who we probably quite like.

"Being an MP should be a privilege, it is not a right. Yet some of these MPs have behaved like they had a divine right not only to hold office but to also pretty much fleece the taxpayer with complete impunity. They have spent months trying to keep these claims secret, secret from the very people that put them into their positions of privilege and pay the taxes that pay their wages and their expenses. Do I think all MPs are bent or on the make? No, but enough of them have abused the system to taint them all and our parliament."

I just feel sorry for the few MPs that genuinely did nothing wrong, have worked hard for their constituents and are now being tarred with the same brush. And the people who work for the MPs that have done something wrong and are having to cope with the public reaction to their manager's misdealings. At this point it's difficult to see how we can trust the people who represent us again.

Games If Adam Curtis (Power of Nightmares, The Trap) ever decided to make a documentary about Massively multiplayer online games, the script might read like this:

"When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few “developer’s favorite” quests, it’s very hard to find the “fun but not exploitative” missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity."

The presumed excuse of it being within the rules seems a bit shop-worn these days. [via]

Given that nearly everyone seems to have seen the film (if you haven’t yet I’d stop reading now, spoilers ahead) and a percentage of them have written reviews, it seems a bit pointless to trot out the usual stuff about how well cast everyone is, how well directed the action sequences are and how the only thing wrong with it is that we have to wait so long for the next adventure. It somehow manages to divine the magical essence of the original series and movies, oxidise them and create something new but completely within the spirit, a conical reboot. I laughed, I cried, I gasped, I spent most of the running time saying “I can’t believe they just did that…” under my breath.

What particularly interested me given my usual franchise predilection was how time travel would be dealt with by screenwriters Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman. Across the decades, Star Trek’s approach to time travel and parallel worlds has been fairly strict; in most of these kinds of episodes it’s accepted that we’re watching one particular timeline and such stories are mostly about the crew figuring out what disruption has been made and then go about the process of making right what once went wrong. So in City On The Edge of Forever, Kirk finds that he has to let Edith Keeler die; Yesterday’s Enterprise is about convincing the captain of the Enterprise-C to take her ship back to were it came from to end civil war; Star Trek: First Contact is about making sure the first warp ship launches on schedule. Enterprise’s main plot arc was about stopping the Xindi’s plans to make the future their own.

On initial inspection, the film would seem to conform to that idea; when Nero breaks into the past and kills Kirk’s father, it looks as though forty years worth of continuity has been chucked out of an airlock, ironically with the exception of the underrated Enterprise which is referenced in there somewhere. But I it isn’t that simple. Cleverly, in franchise terms, what Orci & Kurtman have done is change just slightly how time travel works in their universe by introducing a measure of one of the series little used reality benders, alternate realities. Star Trek hasn’t much dealt with parallel worlds, timelines running concurrently with our (their) own. Basically it’s the hokey old mirror universe or that Next Generation episode, Parallels, in which Worf does indeed travel between realities like the main character in the rubbish Jet Lee film The One, visiting a variety of different universes including one in which Wesley is the tactical officer of the Enterprise-D.

As they explain in this interview without naming names, the writers are essentially using the approach to time travel postulated by physicist David Deutsh to cope with the grandfather paradox. My understanding of what Deutsh suggests that if someone took the decision to travel back in time to kill their own grandfather, what they’d unconsciously succeed in doing is not only travelling in time but also creating an alternate reality in which such murder would be possible allowing for them to continue to exist afterwards. Here, when Nero and Spock pass through the temporal anomaly they’re not just travelling backwards in time, but also space, with the latter pitching up twenty-odd years after the former has set to work. What that would mean is that the Star Trek universe we’ve been watching for forty years still exists and carries on after the destruction of Romulus into the future that Daniels, the Xindi and the timeship Relativity missing one mining ship and a Vulcan Ambassador.

Some reviewers have been sniffy and said, well, it’s action packed but it doesn’t have the thematic depth of the Roddenberry sourced version. Rubbish. The film wrestles with the very theme which has been fundamental to the whole franchise; identity and what makes us human. On a more visible level there’s the eternal struggle between Spock’s Vulcan and human natures where his home planet is, but beneath that, the time travel elements allow us to see what of these characters changes when one of more elements of their biography are interfered with and what doesn’t. As say themselves, in changing history Nero has changed them and so can't predict what their choices will be. Kirk seems more reckless here than in the prime timeline – is that because of the death of his father; how does the death of his mother and home planet effect Spock’s approach to life and how come McCoy hasn’t change a bit (including the casual racism)? Does this mean that Uhura’s first name is finally officially Nyota not Penda or Samara or are they her middle names?

Politics I've been enjoying the ongoing scandal about MPs expenses. It's a perfect opportunity to continue one of my favourite hobbies of shouting at the radio as elected representative after elected representative gives a statement in which they're entirely oblivious as to why we're pissed off with them.

"The boiler broke down in the flat which I use exclusively for overnight stays when I am working on parliamentary business. In order for me to have central heating and hot water a plumber repaired the boiler. This is within the rules."

As though this is a legitimate excuse. It's unfair to single you out, but you and your colleagues have used tax payer money to pay for things which the rest of us have to fund from our own salary, effectively topping up your own already generous packet.

Here, we pay a maintenance allowance so that when our boiler packs in we can have someone visit with their apprentice (always two there are) and hit it or press a button or whatever they do. We don't then put the receipt in wherever we work and claim it on expenses. Where I work, I can't claim anything on expenses. Perhaps next time I should send it to one of these MPs, since they seem very pleased to use our money in the same way.

This parliamentary reputational clusterfuck spins onward at Google News. I don't remember a scandal like this having happened before which has effectively halted the business of government for days. That bit I'm not enjoying. The problem is that as the MPs constantly repeat that what they did was within the rules, then in the next breath say that the rules should be changed, the more desperate they seem and even less like the kinds of people you'd want running a country with our problems. Infighting has broken out now which only increases my feeling of hopelessness.

We've not heard about the Lib Dems yet. I'm not looking forward to that.

Update: Having followed this increasingly confusing story for a bit longer I'm now wondering if it was wrong for Cheryl Gillan, MP for the Chalfonts, Chesham and Amersham to claim for the boiler repair on expenses. If these are the 'digs' she has to have in London away from her proper home in her constituency and the rules did state that is was ok to claim for that on her expenses it doesn't seem that much different to a student having a maintenance grant for their college accommodation (well, before they were largely abolished). But at this point I really don't know. Which is why I try to never write about politics.

Shakespeare Last night, the BBC broadcast one of its best pieces of arts television this year, though most people are unlikely to have heard it was on, let alone seen it. As part of Radio 3’s Mendelssohn weekend, the digital red button service simulcast a semi-staged production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring the composer’s music, specially recorded in the lush environments of the Middle Temple Hall in London and featuring the Ladies' Choir of the Enlightenment, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a fantastic cast who’ve been touring the show for years, including Australia.

Lucky for you, the BBC have put the performance up on their website and it’s a couple of hours well spent, helpfully chopped up into acts, in case you don't have the time to see it all at once. If you are thinking about watching it, I’d stop reading here, because it’s one of those experiences which is best visited unaware with all of the surprises intact. This is the good version of radio on television, and an absolute treat, just the thing to cheer me up after the rotten week I’ve had full of cold (the reason I’ve not been around these parts apart from the pre-prepared regulars).

I was weary. ‘Semi-staged’ suggests that like opera, we’d simply get a reading of the play from some actors sitting at front of the stage with copy books, filling in the text between the music. Sure enough, just before the orchestra begins, Martin Turner and Melanie Jessop stroll on and as the opening overture ends, they stand and begin to read opening scene between Theseus and Hippolyta with little sense of the meaning of what’s being said, bit of mugging. I’m disappointed and thinking about simply recording the rest of it so that I can skip to the music. But I know Egeus is due to make his entrance and I’m interested to see how they handle it.

The way the handle it is the reason I was still watching two and half hours later. When his moment arrives, at the back of the stage, behind the orchestra, another actor pops up and he’s playing Egeus, there’s an audible sigh of relief from the audience. Turner continues from his copybook for a bit then, when he finds himself emphasising a point, irascibly puts it down and continues with the business of acting and soon a full scale production is in flow, with the performers appearing from within the orchestra which then provides the backdrop for the show, the wood near Athens, with the musicians and joining in with the action, with Charles Hazlewood Charles Hazlewood (sporting the beard he presumably grows when it’s the Proms off season) even getting a line.

The rest of the performance is like that, constantly subverting expectations, and part of the fun is watching them cope with the some of the requirements of the play in a venue that should be relatively hostile in terms of environment to this kind of work. I can’t help marvelling at the way that some of the actors are able to double or even triple up as nobles, players and fairies and have us emotionally invest in all of the characters. At one point, I even thought I saw Elena Pavli who plays Hermia, Peter Quince and the First Fairy appearing as two of them in the same scene. It’s great too to see a piece of drama that relies on the audience’s imagination, to be able to tell when an actor has gone from noble to supernatural figure when they’ve turned on the fairy light they have stuck to their dinner jacket.

Hearing Mendelssohn's themes in context is a revelatory experience which as it fades almost seems to bring with it the night and the magical setting of the play, the final pulse of the flutes. The bit that everyone knows, the wedding march, is extraordinary in this full orchestral version, as potent at the Ode To Joy and about as celebratory as music can be. I love the way it’s employed here too, as the moment when Bottom comes out of his reverie, a fully formed human again, perhaps remembering his night with the fairy queen wondering if it was a dream. John Paul Connolly’s bedecked in a Domino’s Pizza uniform seems to be genuinely enjoying himself which means that we do to.

When I was at college, a friend and I wondered what minimalist Star Trek would look like. We decided that nothing very much would happen and it wouldn’t happen over the course of an hour.

The episode opens with a shot of a barren landscape, nothing but a sandy floor stretching for miles (or at least the edges of the studio set with their force perspective hills that didn't really work) and a dark night sky (or backdrop with stars projected on it).

After a few seconds, Kirk beams in, phaser outstretched. We cut to close-up. His eyes darting backwards and forwards in alarm as he realises he’s can’t move. After a few seconds and some dramatic music, cut to titles.

Back from titles and Kirk still can’t move, his eyes still looking about, but every few seconds we can see that they’re repeating the same motion we saw in the teaser.

Spock beams in opposite him, tricorder held aloft. He too is paralysed and can’t move.

“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.

And they’re both caught in the time loop and as we cut back and forth between them, the only thing that changes is the star field behind with imperceptibly moves. This continues for about five minutes, dramatic music, cut to commercials.

Back from commercials:

“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.

A Klingon beams in. He looks fierce and has a disrupter pointed directly at the three of them. The party look startled. Dramatic music, commercials.

Back from commercials.

The party look startled. The party look startled. The party look startled.

Then we see that that Klingon is inching forward slowly and that Spock is moving towards him and that Kirk is reaching for his communicator but that it's all in slow motion. Each time someone beams in the time loop is extended and with the fourth man it's breaking completely.

Kirk is able to hold the communicator to his mouth.

“Scotty?”

Jim, Spock and Bones are beamed away leaving the Klingon alone in the landscape. He’s startled. And because he’s the only one left, the time loop has returned to the way it was when Kirk originally beamed in. Which means…

He’s startled. He’s startled. He’s startled.

For the rest of eternity or his ship mates find a way to get him back.